Verbal Semantics as Eventive Information: The case of verb “制服” and “制約” in Chinese Gigaword Corpus

Using Chinese Gigaword Corpus, this study explores the similarities and differences between two Chinese verbs “制服” (zhì fú) and “制 約” (zhì yuē) to understand the lexicosemantics of verbs with and without an endpoint. First, the distributional patterns show that the two verbs occur mainly in the genre of story of journalism (98.4% for “制服” zhì fú and 99.1% for “制約”). Second, based on the MARVS theory and the tense and aspect markers (“着” zhe、“了” liǎo、“過” guò), we found that “制 服” is telic (accomplishment), representing an event module with an endpoint, that is BOUNDARY (.), while “制約” is atelic and a PROCESS activity (///). Third, in contrast to the unidirectional verb “制服”, “制 約” can be framed bi-directionally between the agent and the patient, using the adverbals such as “相互” (xiāng hù) and “互 相” (hù xiāng). As a continuous PROCESS verb, “制約” can be modified by: a) degree adverbials such as “嚴重” yán zhòng, b) duration /continuous adverbials such as “一直” yī zhí、“繼續” jì xù, and c) starting-relevant adverbials such as “開始” kāi shǐ。The study sheds light on teaching and learning verb meanings through lexicosemantics in context, particularly the event features suggested by the MARVS theory. Copyright © 2021 Association for Computational Lingustics.